Anxiety breakthrough: How to reclaim your inner calm

Words MICHAEL ABDALLAH

Anxiety is usually some sort of undigested trauma that seems to be at the forefront of every moment, with an expectation, fear and resignation. This is because your past experience makes you overdetermine the present moment, and you begin to create in your mind a future experience with which you can identify.

Every time anxiety comes up in a conversation, it always has negative associations. In truth, anxiety is a rush of energy that’s caused by an emotion or a feeling. Our thoughts create the relevant emotions, and those emotions create the feelings that are then associated with its biochemical reaction.

As humans, we tend to focus on negativity; it’s termed ‘negative bias’. Once upon a time, this was very necessary, as the anxiousness a caveman had helped him stay alert and, more importantly, alive. This type of belief system has become so hardwired into our DNA that we’ve lost the ability to focus on growth, as we’ve been scared into a survival mode. The media doesn’t help, with its mantra of ‘if it bleeds it leads’, so naturally you turn the news on in the morning, and you get primed for a day of negativity.

A negative thing may happen, and we immediately react and stress. We continue to think about that experience and stress even more. There’s a part of your brain known as the reticular activating system (RAS) that recognises this pattern and sets itself to scan your day, looking for moments or events to reinforce whatever your current beliefs and emotions are. Your RAS thought all the positive events were not important enough to focus on because they didn’t resonate with your current belief, so it chose to highlight anything that would keep you in your current state of mind.

The truth is that your perspective on anxiety has the power to shape how it impacts you. A recent study in the Journal of Individual Differences found that participants who viewed stressful events as challenges, rather than threats, gained a boost in energy from their anxiety. As a result, their performance improved dramatically, despite its common reputation for being a problematic symptom.

I guess what I am saying is if you can use it to your advantage, there is much to gain from how you deal with your anxious state of mind; that is, not allow it to escalate quickly and control you or cause you to suffer for the rest of your life.

A way to change the problematic feelings that lead to debilitating anxiety is to change the associated thoughts. Ultimately, this leads to changing your actions because thoughts create feelings that dictate an action. Fear and the perceived possibility of a bad thing happening is usually twice as bad than if the real fear actually happened. That’s because whenever we anticipate anything, the thoughts we project and create will always be an extreme version.

Successful people today masterfully use this primitive survival tool and channel that energy towards creating their desired outcome. When you’re able to shift your perception and apply intent, then stress and anxiety become a powerful commodity. That’s because your subjective mind meets the objective truth, and that revelation will highlight that moment and turn it into an ecstatic experience. Consequently, we then look for the next moment that we can apply this new-found knowledge.

Finding your inner calm happens much more easily when you make an active choice to use the agitation or energy that anxiety creates towards your desired and creative purpose. When you can repeat that process, again and again, your body begins to understand that this energy is leverage for getting things done. So this energy no longer brings with it a series of negative imprints but rather a new outlook that is associated with being proactive and productive.

MICHAEL ABDALLAH, creator of Body By Michael (BBM) and its 6 Pillars has been helping people become the healthiest and most appreciative version of themselves for almost 20 years. With qualifications in Nutrition, Exercise Physiology, Exercise Coaching, NLP, Educational Kinesiology, Behavioural Psychology and Postural Assessment and Rehabilitation, his thirst for knowledge is driven by his love of people and seeing the life-changing impact good health has on them and their loved ones. BBM is a platform of health and wellbeing programs and resources, including the VIP program, corporate programs and an App available on both Google Play and the App Store. www.bbmofficial.com